What is creativity?

With the whole country agog in the face of the rumblings within (and without) the ruling party, I thought I should write on something else, lest the party in question come to the erroneous conclusion that it is the only thing worth writing about, which it certainly is not.

In fact, every time, lately, that I tune in to an “after 8 debate” and discover that the topic of discussion centres, yet again, on some or other event or development within (or away from) this party, my first response is to switch off the radio.

Where are the days when, under the able direction of John Perlman, these debates frequently focused on diverse topics such as the credibility of claims surrounding UFOs, or the possibility that the yeti actually exists somewhere in the Himalayas – in short, when one got the impression that there are more valuable and interesting things in the world than a bunch of boring, power-(and money-) crazed politicians. One would swear they are gods, the way everyone talks incessantly about them. There are many things of more enduring interest in the world (one of them being the phenomenon of the ‘political’, of course, which should not be confused with ‘politicians’).

Talking about gods, however, makes me think of a topic worth writing about. On more than one occasion, recently, the subject of creativity has crept into discussions I have had with architecture students, and every time I was struck by the enigmatic character of this god-like capacity on the part of individuals. ‘God-like’, because creativity has been associated with “the gods” and with “God” (the capital letter makes a huge difference in meaning) for a long time.

Among the ancient Greek gods, creative acts were commonplace – Zeus could summon up different guises for himself when he felt like appearing to mortals, especially to women (given that he was, by all accounts, a highly-sexed god); even Hephaestos, the lame artisan-god, was extremely creative, on one occasion devising a net so fine that it was invisible and yet so strong that it trapped his unfaithful wife Aphrodite and Hermes (if I remember correctly) flagrante delicto, imprisoning them until the other gods had witnessed the evidence of their clandestine assignation.

Christian orthodoxy has it that God created the world out of nothing – the so-called doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which differs fundamentally from the ancient Greek mythical belief that there was always ‘something’ – some chaotic condition – and that some other thing or power (time, for example, or nous – the Greek for ‘mind’) organised it into ‘cosmos’; that is, an ordered totality. The Greek conception is far more human than the Christian one in the sense that it is a mythical approximation of precisely what human creativity is all about. No human being could ever create anything out of nothing – whether it is a wordsmith creating ethereal poetry out of the stuff of extant language, to wit, words, or whether it is an artist or an architect creating a sculpture, a painting, a multi-media work or a building-design, out of some pre-existing “material(s)”. The best human beings can do is to rearrange, revise, re-organise, or transform, transmogrify, what she or he has been confronted with in the world into which he or she has been born.

And it is not only material in the usual sense which constitutes the condition for creatively appropriating it. Every artist or architect also has to work on the basis of the conventions that she or he is familiar with. Whether one conforms and works within the convention you know, or whether one rejects it in favour of another, or instead transforms it inventively, no one can bypass the world of conventional language and form. Succinctly put: there is no invention without convention (and vice versa) in human culture.

Not everyone is equally inventive, of course – this is why “schools” of art and architecture develop. A highly original artist, writer or architect (Raphael, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Corbusier) may create works that are so paradigmatically creative that they are termed “original” and a host of other artists, writers, or architects then follow in the footsteps of such an inventive genius. This happens in philosophy, too. And it is striking to what extent novel work in a discipline or artistic field assumes the guise of wrestling or struggling with the legacy of the artist, or writer, or architect, or philosopher, who is seen as posing the greatest challenge to those who would like to be inventive.

Harold Bloom has referred to this as the “anxiety of influence” and has pictured “originality” as something that results from a kind of Freudian patricide (or matricide, for that matter), where the young, up and coming poet struggles against the “father” (or “mother”) with the intention of “writing them dead”, surpassing these exemplars in their own work. In a way, this is the greatest compliment one creative person can pay another – to measure one’s own prowess against the achievements of another and attempt to surpass these.

But make no mistake, the idea of the “author” as an “original” person who gives rise to him- or herself, as it were, is a fallacy. Even the most inventive “author” works with an inherited language or tradition and creative work would be impossible unless this idiom, language or tradition were first mastered. When René Descartes uttered the founding sentence of modern philosophy – “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum) – he may have been under the impression that he had found the rock of presuppositionless indubitability, but he was mistaken. This gesture of self-founding did rest on something which he did not acknowledge, namely language (Latin and French) which pre-existed him. Without a language into which he was born, he could not have formulated his epoch-creating words, which decisively separated the modern era from the medieval.

As humans, we are ineluctably constituted by language — the ‘discourse of the Other’. This is not to knock creativity, of course. On the contrary – while most human beings are so utterly conventional that they would hardly dream of tinkering with conventions in politics, religion, education and so on, the experimental spirit of the avant garde in art, so greatly valued by the late French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard, comprises the paradigm for inventiveness, for attempting to find ways of thinking and representing that have not been thought of, or imagined, before, and to represent imaginatively that which, perhaps, cannot be represented at all. Whether it is through the invention of life-promoting, ‘green’ technology, or through an imaginative politics, or economics (that goes beyond the tired, existing repetition of the same), or an architecture which reminds its inhabitants what their ‘place’ in the world is as human beings, creativity transforms given, inherited states of affairs inventively into different, often better, ones.

This all means that, in the final analysis, to be creative one has to have the courage to enter uncharted territory, too. Perhaps creativity in politics would therefore not be a bad thing.